“He laughed in his delirium; and the woman, sitting by his side, laughed also; and then the truth flashed across me.

“I ran up to her and caught her by the arm.  ‘Your name’s not Louise,’ I said, looking straight at her.  It was an impertinent interference, but I felt excited, and acted on impulse.

“‘No,’ she replied, very quietly; ’but it’s the name of a very dear school friend of mine.  I’ve got the clue to-night that I’ve been waiting two years to get.  Good-night, nurse, thanks for fetching me.’

“She rose and went out, and I listened to her footsteps going down the stairs, and then drew up the blind and let in the dawn.

“I’ve never told that incident to any one until this evening,” my nurse concluded, as she took the empty port wine glass out of my hand, and stirred the fire.  “A nurse wouldn’t get many engagements if she had the reputation for making blunders of that sort.”

Another story that she told me showed married life more lovelit, but then, as she added, with that cynical twinkle which glinted so oddly from her gentle, demure eyes, this couple had only very recently been wed—­had, in fact, only just returned from their honeymoon.

They had been travelling on the Continent, and there had both contracted typhoid fever, which showed itself immediately on their home-coming.

“I was called in to them on the very day of their arrival,” she said; “the husband was the first to take to his bed, and the wife followed suit twelve hours afterwards.  We placed them in adjoining rooms, and, as often as was possible, we left the door ajar so that they could call out to one another.

“Poor things!  They were little else than boy and girl, and they worried more about each other than they thought about themselves.  The wife’s only trouble was that she wouldn’t be able to do anything for ’poor Jack.’  ‘Oh, nurse, you will be good to him, won’t you?’ she would cry, with her big childish eyes full of tears; and the moment I went in to him it would be:  ’Oh, don’t trouble about me, nurse, I’m all right.  Just look after the wifie, will you?’

“I had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of her sister, I was nursing them both.  It was an unprofessional thing to do, but I could see they were not well off, and I assured the doctor that I could manage.  To me it was worth while going through the double work just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that sweetened those two sick-rooms.  The average invalid is not the patient sufferer people imagine.  It is a fretful, querulous, self-pitying little world that we live in as a rule, and that we grow hard in.  It gave me a new heart, nursing these young people.